New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

148 The New Imperialists
a world convulsed by war. Thucydides was guided by a sense of measure
oriented cosmologically; the History is infused with the sense of a world
turned bad. He is never merely sizing things up as an empiricist bent on
revealing the sociological or all-too-human truths in the world; the
History is never exclusively grounded in immanence. The analytical
character of the Peloponnesian War is not premised upon the radical
suspension of the more transcendent aspects of thought in a manner
typical of we late moderns, and to read the History so is to interpret it in a
way that says more about the intellectual pretensions of ourselves –
pretensions that have caught the critical eye of Whitehead and others –
than it does about Thucydides’ work.
This essay contends that the deepest ideological moment of the
Straussians’ reading of Thucydides is, ironically, their very modern rejection
of the transcendent element in the History, an interpretive fallacy
that presupposes a sharp disjunction between metaphysical speculation
and empirical sociology, and a rejection that ultimately comes to rest on
the claim that the historian merely disclosed the truths about human
nature and its propensity for war and empire. Their reading of
Thucydides is striking because Straussian thought is fond of harvesting
ancient thought to expose the ills of modernity, and thus the irony of
their Procrustean reading of Thucydides from a distinctively modern
perch. It is also ironic because Straussian thought has occasionally seen
the folly of pretentiously repudiating the idea of judgement in modern
social science. 33 The interpretive fallacy of modernity prevents Straussian
thinkers from seeing the richness of Thucydides’ work, and more particularly
leads to their repudiation of the claim that there are cosmological
or transcendent aspects in the History. As we release ourselves from such
interpretive shackles, as we disentangle the entwined aspects of the
ancient historian’s thought, we can begin to see that the transcendent
aspects of the History furnish the critique of war and empire, and
establish continuity between the historian and the poetic reflex of the
time. Although the foremost concern of the intellectuals of Thucydides’
day was the health and stability of the polis, especially the scourge of stasis
(factionalism possibly leading to civil strife), the matter of war and
empire figured prominently in their thinking. Certainly, the tendency
to celebrate and even glorify war hung in the air as is evident in the
following passage from the Iliad: